


In this small place

by JoAsakura



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 17:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2237781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(a bit more cleaned up than the alpha version)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In this small place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sorrowfulcheese](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorrowfulcheese/gifts).



They could have lived anywhere, after all, they were Big Damn Heroes - but the old house suited them fine. And much like everything else in their lives, it needed continuous, fiddling work. Paint and plumbing here, gappy windows there but the clanking radiators that had been out of fashion for centuries worked more reliably on Vancouver’s shaky power grid than any of the modern types and those old windows filled every room with light.

The weedy lot behind it had been, through Shepard’s careful work, converted from a refuse-filled nightmare into a vegetable garden paradise. Plants curled up trellises made from repurposed war debris and fish and frogs splashed in the pond. In the late golden light, Kaidan smiled, setting dinner out on a scavenged picnic table. The plates had come from the Normandy, and some still showed the cracks from the ship's crash in the last moments of the War. There was a red smear on his apron, across the face of the smiling krogan holding a pair of BBQ tongs, a smear from on overripe tomato. Kaidan looked down at it, twirling the knife in his hands as he tried to still the momentary panic in his heart.

The dinnerware wasn't the only thing that still occasionally showed damage from the war.

He handled most of the cutting duties, knife making short work of the tomatoes and cucumbers as thin slices fell in neat rows. Shepard’s hands still shook too much for delicate work. He would set the clattering blade down, and smile in that rueful, Russian way. For a man dead twice, he couldn't complain, he said. 

Neither could Kaidan, as he heard the laughter from behind the shrubs. The sound shook him from darker thoughts and he called out to them. “Hey, you guys, dinner!”

Their family had grown, in always the way it had before, even if this new crew was slightly smaller in stature. A number of children who’d had no place else to go in the aftermath of the war, a battle-scarred varren left behind by blood packers who’d shipped out ages ago. A handful of cats and a scruffy dog with a limp.

Shepard’s hands might have shook on a knife, but they held steady the laughing girl wrapped in a too-large hoodie on his shoulders (faded and bleached and worn it's original black now as grey as the hairs both of them were showing), as one of the boys sat on the varren’s back, child and animal alike both proud like a knight and his steed.

"Look what I found lurking around, K." Shepard grinned as he set their daughter down. "You think we should keep 'em?"

"SHEPPY~!" She squealed, fake-slapping at him as Kaidan set out sandwiches, a dragonfly buzzing past loudly to visit the small pond.

"Yeah." Kaidan leaned on the table, looking over the small, safe place they'd made. "Yeah, I think I’ll keep you all."


End file.
